1. Technical Field
The present invention relates in general to a system and method for distributing management events to external processes. More particularly, the present invention relates to a system and method for a remote listener to receive notifications by registering on a local server.
2. Description of the Related Art
Computer systems have event emitters which broadcast events to one or more component listeners. For example, when a server malfunctions, an event describing the malfunction may be broadcast to one or more components that are listening for the particular event. Computer systems incorporate a notification service to manage event disbursement. The notification service typically has components, such as a local receiver, a local sender, and an event notifier, that communicate with each other to send and receive notifications.
A Java Management Extension (JMX) exists which includes an event notification mechanism. The JMX defines a set of interfaces to broadcast events, listen for events, and filter events. The notification mechanism is a standard vehicle for components in the computer system to emit events and receive responses to events. The JMX specification describes a notification mechanism within a local process. However, a challenge found with existing art is that it does not describe how to send events and receive responses in a distributed computer system, or multi-server, multi-client environment.
In a distributed computer system, two types of notification listeners may be present which are local notification listeners and remote notification listeners. A local notification listener is registered locally on the same server in which a notification service exists. A remote notification listener resides on a client or server other than where the notification service resides.
A challenge found with existing art is that existing art requires a remote listener to include additional packages such as an Enterprise Java Bean (EJB) stub library or other remote procedure calling (RPC) mechanisms. In other words, existing art requires the remote notification listener to include a transport protocol in its' code, which complicates the task of registering with a notification service.
What is needed, therefore, is a way for a remote notification listener to register on its' local server and receive events from a notification service located on a separate server